At a telecoms conference I attended ten years or so ago I saw a presenter convincingly argue that as mobile phones had become more advanced and added new features, so the ease of making phone calls - and in some cases the quality of those calls - had consistently deteriorated.

I wonder what that presenter would now - in the era of the touchscreen smartphone - say about how basic telephony functionality has been sacrificed as handset vendors focus all their resources on producing an optimal Internet and mobile applications experience.

Among touchscreen smartphone users there seems to be a universal resignation about the poor quality and experience of making phone calls. Dropped calls and frozen screens are common complaints while lengthy call set up times are a fact of life. And if you are one of those people that turn their phone off before they go to bed it can take a frustrating minute or so when you switch it on again in the morning before you make a phone call. After all, what you are really doing is booting up a computer and making a phone call on it.

Basic telephony functions are also compromised as operators have migrated their customers to 3G networks and added battery-burning WiFi to their phones. It would be interesting to speculate on how much voice-call revenue operators have foregone because their customers' phones have run out of battery.

Finally, operators have continued to optimize their networks for basic phone functionality rather than smartphones which means that their networks may not always offer the same voice signal strength or quality to smartphones as to feature or basic phones.

It's almost as if mobile operators have decided that broadband and data are the future of their businesses and that there is nothing to be gained by offering their customers a good voice experience.

This might very well be the case. No operators seem to be focussed on this issue or - if they are - they are not gaining competitive advantage from it. The evidence to date is that smartphone users are so enamoured by the Internet and applications capabilities of their devices that they are quite happy for their basic voice telephony services to be compromised.

But operators should, at the same time, question such assumptions. Broadband and data are undeniably the future growth areas for operators and voice revenues are in decline. But voice still represents a colossal 70% of mobile operator revenues globally and it is absolutely essential that operators do everything they can to slow the revenue decline.

Rather than accepting - and potentially accelerating - this decline by offering a voice service that fails to live up to everything else that smartphones have to offer, could operators adopt a different approach and exploit their customers' apparent willingness to carry two or more connected devices?

The mobile industry now believes that the key to increasing revenues is generating single revenue streams from multiple devices rather than multiple revenue streams from single devices. During 2011 many operators will introduce dual and multi-SIM products that allow customers to put two connected devices onto the same bill. So, how about pulling the voice (and text) capability out of the smartphone and putting them into a single device - a mobile telephone?

There is already some evidence in the business market that some iPad owners are swapping their iPhones for feature phones. This may be on the grounds of cost and the fact that so many of the attractions and benefits of the iPhone are replicated in the iPad. And with most existing smartphone and laptop vendors poised to launch rival tablets in the next six months this smartphone-downsizing approach could gain traction among consumers.

For handset manufacturers, will this trend create a new market for existing feature and basic phones or is there, perhaps, an opportunity to bring out new high-end voice and text devices? The trend today is for handset vendors to incorporate as many features and capabilities aimed at providing a mobile broadband and Internet experience as possible within a specific cost framework. But maybe they could strip these out and add enhanced voice and text features and functionality.Maybe operators could look again at push-to-talk. What if this was to be integrated with the phone book? Voice to text and text to voice functionality might also be worth incorporating. And operators are now starting to roll out high-definition voice which would come as a standard feature.

What about the design, the look-and-feel of the phone? Some years ago Siemens tried unsuccessfully to introduce new, fashionable form factors. Is this perhaps worth revisiting? Maybe now is the time for the first retro phones? In the same way that the new Mini, Volkswagen Beetle and Fiat 500 have recognisable bodies but cutting-edge technologies under the bonnets, maybe Motorola could bring out a new Startac but with enhanced voice and text capabilities sitting behind the recognisable 1996 exterior.

It is unusual in the consumer electronics sector for manufacturers to strip out new features and functionalities. Vendors tend to add ever more capabilities to guard against price erosion. As such handset vendors are unlikely to embrace a new high-end voice and text device concept. Rather, it would be up to the operators to embrace the concept themselves and put some belief into their voice and text network and service strategies rather than merely accepting a role as networks to connect smartphones.